As owner of the bed of the port of Newcastle, NSW Maritime has been actively involved in the proposal to dredge the south arm of the Hunter River in order to permit the expansion of coal export wharves and facilitate future development of the former BHP steelworks site.

NSW Maritime was granted development consent in 2005, and has prepared a strategic dredging program under which private sector proponents will carry out significant dredging works. NSW Maritime has an important facilitation role as both landowner and proponent and is responsible for providing a number of approvals including individual dredging plans and dredging licences.

The first private sector proponent, the Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Group (NCIG) has begun its $160M dredging project in which approximately 6.1 cubic metres including 3 million cubic metres of clean sand will be dredged in order to provide deep water to its proposed berths K8 and K9, with the clean sand used for fill and pre-loading on its coal terminal site. The NCIG dredging program involves a series of backhoe, cutter section and grab dredgers and has an estimated completion date of April 2009.

Further dredging will be carried out by BHPBilliton from the middle of 2008 which will remove and treat approximately 650,000 cubic metres of contaminated river sediments resulting from BHP’s former steelwork operations.

Backhoe dredger BD Storken in action creating the access channel at the commencement of the NCIG dredging program